In late October, Gov. Greg Abbott met with a legislator upset by the 1959 Children of the Confederacy Creed plaque near the Capitol Rotunda in Austin.

The plaque reads in part: "We, therefore, pledge ourselves to preserve pure ideals: to honor our veterans; to study and teach the truths of history (one of the most important of which is, that the War Between the States was not a rebellion, nor was its underlying cause to sustain slavery)."

A few days later, Austin Mayor Steve Adler excused himself from the city's Veterans Day parade, as the Confederate flag was planned to be hoisted by some participants.

I grew up in New Braunfels. Every summer, it was swarmed by tourists who wanted to camp, float the rivers or ride the water slide. In high school, I learned that you could trap tourists in the roundabout at the center of town and get them to drive in circles.

Today, I feel the same way, stuck in an endless circular argument about the place of Confederate symbols in today's culture.

At least in my college history classes, most students understand the cause of the Civil War. They've read documents like the Texas Declaration of Causes, seen documentaries and read enough histories to know that slavery was the issue behind states' rights and sectionalism. Even our public school eighth-grade history curriculum expects this of students.

But the idea of removing monuments, changing school, buildings and street names or removing Confederate symbols is still an emotional topic.

Photo: Jay Janner, Associated Press

The Children of the Confederacy Creed plaque at the Capitol in Austin.

The Children of the Confederacy Creed plaque at the Capitol in Austin.

Many believe the movement to remove Confederate symbols is a reaction to Dylann Roof's murderous rampage at a Charleston church in 2015, but these controversies have a much deeper past.

In the early 1960s, the NAACP protested when South Carolina began flying the Confederate flag on its statehouse, supposedly to commemorate the centennial of the Civil War, noting that the decision coincided with Senator Strom Thurmond's filibuster of the 1957 Civil Rights Act. Thurmond ran as the candidate for the "Dixiecrats" (States' Rights Party), which promoted a segregationist platform and made the flag their emblem. In 2000, the South Carolina legislature agreed to take down the flag from the statehouse and move it to a pedestal on the capitol grounds. Governor Nikki Haley finally ordered its removal in 2015.

Robert E. Lee himself was opposed to monuments: "I think it would be wiser moreover not to keep open the sores of war, but to follow the example of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife and commit to oblivion the feels it engendered."

But when Richmond unveiled a large monument to Lee in 1890 it attracted 100,000 spectators. The editor of an African-American paper noted that few blacks attended and echoed Lee, writing, "It serves to reopen the wounds of war and causes to drift further apart the two sections."

In the 1990s, New Orleans began changing the names of its schools from those of former slaveholders to African-American role models.

In October, a Jackson, Miss., elementary school PTA recommenced changing the school's namesake from Jefferson Davis to Barack Obama, which would make it the second school in the South, besides Texas, to have a school named for him.

Closer to home, Houston Independent School District (HISD) trustees voted to rename seven schools this May. Two years earlier, schools renamed insensitive mascots from "Indians" and "Redskins" to "Texans" and "Huskies."

When the cost for renaming schools was estimated at $1.2 million, a group of concerned parents said the money would be better spent reinvesting in the students' education. Trustee Joland Jones said, "Whenever it comes to doing things as it relates to minorities, people always talk about money."

Last year, after San Antonio's North East ISD trustees voted against renaming Robert E. Lee High School, a San Antonio resident who graduated from a segregated school in the 1950s said, "They haven't walked in my shoes. They don't understand what I go through when I walk past those things."

Last month, the board voted rename the school "Legacy of Educational Excellence" — dropping the "Robert E." and keeping LEE.

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As for the plaque in the Capitol, Eva Long, the president of the United Daughters of the Confederacy Texas division, dismissed the controversy. "There are a lot of things that offend me, and I just look the other way," she said.

But the point is that local communities should decide which community leaders, presidents, military heroes or educators they hold as laudable and whom they will commemorate. There is a price to change, but keeping symbols of racism and oppression has a cost beyond money.

Dr. Gene B. Preuss is an associate professor of history at the University of Houston-Downtown. He earned a Ph.D. in history from Texas Tech University and is author of To Get a Better School System: One Hundred Years of Education Reform in Texas (Texas A&M University Press, 2009), and co-author of A Kineno's Journey: On Family, Learning, and Public Service (Texas Tech University Press, 2016) with former U.S. Secretary of Education Lauro F. Cavazos.